Do something! Do something! Do something NOW! That was the refrain Berta was hearing from the renters one weekend morning. Berta is the employee in charge of a rental property and the best cook and housekeeper in San Miguel de Allende. Her technical expertise does not extend very far into network topology or internet troubleshooting though. Berta tries hard to please, sometimes too hard, so with the tenants vociferously wailing that they were being deprived of Facebook, she succumbed to the pressure of the moment.

To keep tenants from fooling with the computer network, the modem, wireless access points and router are all under lock and key at this rental house, but Berta has the keys and this time she let herself be browbeaten into using them. The tenants said they “just looked” at the equipment, but when I arrived I could tell that “just looking” also included switching Ethernet cables from place to place and pressing all the reset buttons. It took me an hour to straighten out the mess they made.